Talk:Fundraising 2010/Committee

Standing community committee?

I like the idea of public working groups like this. Was there any talk of organizing a standing community group focused on fundraising after the Spring fundraising summit? That might be able to take on many of the things that this committee proposes to do. I'd be interested to know how many local groups fundraise year-round and how many focus on the annual fundraiser. Presumably chapters that aren't yet tied into the WMF fundraiser look for other sources of funding such as grants and partnerships, throughout the year.

For instance, I sympathize with Joseraeiro who wants to learn better ways to raise funds for local efforts around open education generally; building community expertise in fundraising will reap benefits for many such satellite efforts. And we could invite people from Drumbeat and other awareness-building projects to join us in developing our own ideas. –SJ · talk | translate

A Standing community committee seems like it would be going along the lines of what the Community positions recently advertised on the blog are for. I'd worry that the two overlap too much. That said, it's not a dissent against the idea (which I think is great), just a dissent against a potential overlap of resources and authorities. ⇒SWATJester ^{Son of the Defender} 04:41, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Staff positions are not intended to replace community committees... the staff in the community department works through and with the community. Sj, there was a fundraising list created after the Bristol summit, but I'm not sure whether it was intended to include the whole community or just chapters members. Philippe (WMF) 18:33, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Swatjester: you are quite right, clarity is important. Ideally everyone feels empowered to help and glad for the support of the others. Philippe: Thanks, that's good to hear... you may need to repeat it a few times. :) In particular, in areas where the community has been disorganized in the past and staff help provide order and basic project management, it's often unclear whether the idea is to develop community capacity and hand off responsbility, or to continue owning that process.

I also don't know about the list -- has this been resolved? –SJ · talk | translate 23:29, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Next steps and related pages

Should the whole fundraising list be included here? Or is there a desire to separate the work of this committee from the work of a standing committee as above? At any rate, perhaps the first topics to dusciss are those that came out of the fundraising meeting; this may be focused on what can be done to improve local and distributed fundraising, rather than the large global fundraiser, but that will provide context for the new people who have signed up here (how many of them were at the spring meeting?) –SJ · talk | translate

Some links worth adding to the page (or potential pages to merge with this one):

• discussions about last year's fundraiser
• notes and docs from this year's fundraising summit
• discussions from previous years about when and how to fundraise

I don't want to help

1. if the Foundation has money to hire a censor, they should have the money to create a good Foundraiser (and hire a person for Foundraising, actually we have a lot of people in the head quater but nobody strictly for this important job). I also don't understand, why the "Head of Reader Relations for the Wikimedia Foundation" ask such a question here. 1st it is a Comunity-thing, not a Reader-thing. 2nd we have some Staff-members who are getting paid for this. 3rd the Foundation never really was interested in the opinion or in ideas of the Comunity. No thank. Marcus Cyron 01:50, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Hi Marcus: We have several people in headquarters for fundraising. I'm one of them. If you think about it, "Head of Reader Relations" really does imply a couple of thing... first, I'm directly connected to the community: my history is community based, and one of the largest sources of income for the Foundation (and thus, the projects) is our readers. It makes sense to have me deeply involved with the fundraiser. As you may have seen, the Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Community Giving is leaving us. So I've been asked to take a role in leading the team that's going to work on this year's fundraiser. That's the call we're making here: for community folks to get involved in guiding and directing this fundraiser. I'm really sad that you think the Foundation was never involved in community ideas, because I don't think history bears that out, but I'm not sure this is really the place to get into that issue. I regret that you won't be involved with the fundraiser, but hope you'll appreciate that we have a number of community members who've said they want to help, and I'm going to take them up on it. Philippe (WMF) 02:24, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

+1? I don't think it is weird at all to have the Head of Reader Relations helping to lead this especially given Rand leaving. It also fits quite well with the new fundraising strategy of focusing on community giving. Readers are quite obviously an enormous part of the focus for a community fundraising, editors also give but there are less of them and in general they are already giving huge amounts of their time. It also makes sense given the formation of the new Community Department that people would move among different jobs within the department. Why should they focus on just one when more help is needed in certain areas at certain times and when all the areas of the department are interrelated?

I also find it odd that you would say that they just don't care about what the community thinks anyway. Obviously most/all of us didn't like Wikipedia Forever (sorry Philippe if you were part of that, but you know it's true :P ). That said however some of my favorite, and I believe most popular, banners ended up coming from community members who decided to help out at Alternative banners and the feed back areas. It may have started odd but I think the responded well to complaints and that is part of the deal, starting now just shows that perhaps they learnt that they want to try and get more feedback before it starts this time (which was one of the biggest complaints the past couple years :) ). James (T C) 02:56, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

(Just wanted to nit-pick and point out that it's not really a new focus on community giving... I'm pretty sure that we've always been more keen on getting smaller donations than big grants/donations from Foundations/corporations. Other than that, yeah. :-) Cbrown1023 talk 04:22, 28 July 2010 (UTC))

Well obviously it was part of it! But I believe they explicitly were going towards a "balanced approach" so that they didn't rely on any one kind :) Now it isn't balanced, we're relying ;) James (T C) 18:47, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Meetings

I've added this to a new subpage and linked it into the template, and I'm going to drop some talk page notes tomorrow, but...

Hi all,

I'd like to have a meeting on IRC this week to discuss the 2010-2011 annual appeal/fundraiser. This will be an "anyone is welcome" type meeting, open to the broad community. During this, Zack Exley and I will take you through our inital thoughts about the fundraiser and its organization, and ask you to join us in a discussion about the (massive) role of volunteers and chapters in this year's fundraiser.

Because of the vagaries of time zones, scheduling live meetings is hard. So, we'll have a couple of potential times, and we'll log and post the meeting for anyone who wasn't able to make it.

The meetings will be held Thursday, 12 August at 23:00 UTC (16:00 PDT) and Friday, 13 August at 16:30 UTC (09:30 PDT) in the #wikimedia-fundraising channel on the freenode network on IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-fundraising). You can access this using freenode's webclient, which is available at http://webchat.freenode.net/ or by using your favorite IRC client.

Hope to see you there! Philippe (WMF) 03:20, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I will try to be there both times. Huib talk ^Abigor 19:44, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Current Committee Structure

I have an issue with the current committee structure, of the 3 groups, 2 seem to be focused on translation and localization. I think the third group should be renamed to only outreach, and the translation one should be expanded to include localization. Outreach alone is a big group that would require the most amount of work, promoting and supporting the campaign on an ongoing basis. Translation on the other hand would be over once the message finalization and translation process is over. Having two groups for translation/ localization seems rather superfluous or am I missing something?--Theo10011 20:24, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

I'll talk it over with Philippe. The intent for this setup is to keep translations as translations and not localization. Localization will be the focus of customizing messages for optimal performance on our individual projects should they need it. So, translation will be done once the messages are finalized, yes. However, we're being fluid in targeting this year instead of the rigidity of message last year. This follows that localization will be a big part of the outreach process.

With that said, I'm open to branching localization out into its own. There could be a good reason for this because most outreach will be completed by the time we start up the drive, and localization will be working with contacts on wikis that may require a different message should need be. Good thought, Theo10011. Keegan (WMF), Fundraising 2010 03:47, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

I could be a local ambassador for pl wikimedia. Przykuta 05:43, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Why thank you, Przykuta. You'll be working with Deniz for that language. We appreciate the offer of service! Keegan (WMF), Fundraising 2010 06:41, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Ok thanks Keegan. localization involves inter-wiki work mostly. I have a concern about outreach for example, as you may know I have been working on a social media campaign and we have a couple of volunteers who already signed up for that task specifically. Since we would require the social media campaign to run along side the drive, the outreach process through those places will be ongoing. Would the Social Media campaign be under outreach then?--Theo10011 15:02, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Another good question. I'll run it by Deniz in our conference tomorrow and get back to you ASAP, and reorganize if necessary. 173.156.42.163 03:36, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

That was me. FWIW, I am no where near Kansas. Keegan (WMF), Fundraising 2010 06:10, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Done, talked it over with Denize. Thanks.--Theo10011 21:56, 10 September 2010 (UTC)